Two Thoughts and a Question Answered

Mar 27, 2013 12:52 pm ET

We have three thoughts today, actually two because one is a question.

The question: if the Supreme Court is so leery of ruling on same-sex marriage, why did they take the two cases they’re hearing? Reporters hear reluctance and ambivalence in the justice’s questions yesterday to the lawyers standing before them. I thought the high court decides to hear cases on which they believe their rulings and finding may be constitutionally clarifying. I cannot find the answer to my question in all the coverage this morning and hope a reporter will see this and tell us the answer.

(Ah. My editor, James Taranto, has given me the answer. It takes four justices to agree to hear a case, which could leave as many as five who'd rather not hear it. I didn't know that. I thought a majority of the court had to agree on what cases to take.)

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Politico has a story on whether the Democrats waited too long after Newtown to move forward on gun-control legislation. The subject also came up on the panel on “This Week” on Sunday.

In my view Congress did, and their misjudgment was based on a very human flaw, conceit. In Congress’s case it is chronic and mindless.

Nobody trusts Congress. We all know this. Approval of Congress is at 13% in the polls. Part of this is the general decline in respect that Americans feel for their institutions. But part of it also is that Congress the past few years has taken to passing 1,000- or 2,000-page bills that nobody has read, and nobody knows what’s in them, and, as Nancy Pelosi famously said, we have to pass it to find out what’s in it. Administrators and bureaucrats get to define the meaning of page 873, paragraph 8, subsection 5, line 12. Their definitions often agitate the public. Everyone winds up feeling jerked around.

Nobody trusts what Congress does. And it is the job of Congress to know it isn’t trusted, and to work to develop trust, to try to build up faith in their institution. They can do this in part by developing, bringing to the floor and passing small, discrete, specific bills that everybody can understand. Those who are interested can read them online and feel satisfied they know the answer to what has become the great question of our day: “What just happened?”

In the case of Newtown, I feared in the days after that Congress would not move quickly but instead take time to create a more “comprehensive” approach, not understanding that the minute voters see the word comprehensive they think, “Uh oh, they’re hiding things again on page 873, paragraph 8, subsection 5, line 12!” And opposition would build. And nothing good would happen.

I urged a quick, short, simple bill that would ban the use of big ugly monstrous high-capacity magazines. Make people reload after seven or eight shots. It won’t hurt hunters, it won’t leave your house less safe, and in the cases of crazy people attacking children and mallgoers it will force them to reload, in which time someone might be able to knock them down or get the gun from their hands.

A quick bill like that would in my view have had a high chance of passing. Gun-control proponents would then have been able to go before the cameras, announce a victory, claim momentum, and vow to move forward next on reasonable background checks.

Instead they dithered, allowed it to drag on, put together various items antigun activists have long wanted, and now Congress is on vacation and those who don’t trust it are fully mobilized and it doesn’t look like anything good is going to happen.

Congressional overreach? No, sheer idiotic conceit.

An important part of being a good public servant is having a strong sense of the reality all around you. It is important if you’re in Congress to understand that you work for and within an institution no one trusts. When people don’t trust you, you should try to build trust. The word comprehensive is not, now, a trust builder. It is experienced as a four-syllable threat. So don’t be comprehensive if you don’t absolutely have to. Be simple, straight, quick and clear.

Why do senators and representatives forget they are not trusted? Some of them forget because they’ve been there a long time: When they arrived, Congress was respected. They can’t quite absorb the fact that it isn’t anymore.

Another reason is that congressmen have a tendency to think voters hate the institution but don’t hate them; in fact, they think, voters like them, which is why they got elected. And a third reason they don’t see how distrusted they are is that we taxpayers give them really nice lives with great offices and big staffs and people who take care of them. They get wonderful pensions and benefits. This may not make them rich but it does make them secure, which most of their countrymen are not. And all this destabilizes a lot of them and affects their ability to see clearly. They’re always treated with respect: “Yes, Congressman, this way.” Children from back home come to Washington on spring break and sing to them on the steps of the Capitol. Everyone loves them. Congress couldn’t really be disliked. If it were, the children wouldn’t sing.